Our friends, the bees, have certain behaviors that are unhealthy for the hive and frightening for passers-by. One behavior, swarming, happens when a hive naturally splits with a group of bees following a new queen. This is a delicate time for the hive and can result in starving bees and a dead queen. In other words, it’s bad.
A beekeeper, Herbert M. Aumann, has a solution. His system is a small vibration and motion sensor that attaches to the outside of a hive and transmits data about the bees’ behavior. Beekeepers can split hives before swarming starts, and so this system uses the two sensors to pick up the behavior before it acts like a waterfall.
“This sensor is mounted on the outside of a basket, close to the entrance to the basket,” Aumann wrote in a study in IEEE Sensors Letters“The outward-facing sensor is a 24 GHz continuous wave Doppler radar for tracking the flight activity of bees. The inward-facing sensor is a piezoelectric transducer. Unlike a conventional microphone that picks up the sounds of bees, the piezoelectric transducer picks up the incidental vibrations transmitted to the hive structure by bee activity. “
The system then calculates the probability of a swarm and notifies the beekeeper so she can keep her little yellow and black loads safe. When the bees gather for a swarming event, the sensor will sense the vibrations from the event, allowing the beekeeper to stop the activity by adjusting the hive enough to keep the bees in place. The sensor can also notify the beekeeper of predatory events when bees from outside a hive take over an entire hive and steal the honey from weaker bees.
“Having spent my entire career building radar systems for tracking small targets, I thought I could use a low-powered radar to observe bees from maybe three meters away. I could indeed, ”said Aumann Spectrum“Amazingly, the signals picked up by the radar could be converted into an acoustic signal that sounded exactly like the one you’d hear next to the beehive.”
G / O Media can receive a commission
He built a startup, Maine Biosensors, to produce these electronics for beekeepers who want to keep their little honey-making friends healthy and happy. He’s not selling them yet but he expects to have consumer models soon.